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Anyone who grew up in the 1980s or 1990s probably remembers a pantry full of games. The kinds with tiny plastic pieces, questionable life lessons, or those that led to someone playing 52 Card Pickup. As it turns out, some of those games provide surprisingly good metaphors for divorce.
While a New Jersey divorce involves serious legal, financial, and family issues, anyone who practices family law long enough starts to recognize certain familiar patterns. Sometimes you climb. Sometimes you slide.
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Chutes and Ladders: When Progress Is Not a Straight Line
You finally exchanged financial information and the house was appraised. Settlement discussions are moving forward and up the ladder. Then someone changes a position that everyone thought had been resolved. A discovery issue surfaces. The refinancing falls through. A parenting dispute erupts. Welcome to the chute.
Divorce rarely progresses in a perfectly straight line. There may be weeks when significant progress is made followed by a setback that makes someone feel like they have landed ten spaces behind where they started. The important thing is to keep moving toward the finish line. A temporary setback does not necessarily mean that settlement is impossible or that every issue needs to be litigated from scratch.
The Game of Life: Divorce Rarely Follows the Original Route
The Game of Life had a tidy concept of adulthood: choose a path, get a job, get married, buy a house, have children, and drive your little plastic car toward retirement.
Actual life is considerably less predictable and one thing The Game of Life may have gotten surprisingly right, however, was the occasional blue space announcing: “Lawsuit. Sue another player for $100,000.” Apparently, even Hasbro understood that sometimes life takes an unexpected turn into litigation.
Divorce can require families to reconsider nearly every part of the life they built together. One household becomes two. Parenting schedules change. Assets must be divided.
In New Jersey, the goal of the divorce process is not to pretend that those changes have not occurred. It is to determine how the family’s financial and parenting circumstances should operate going forward. You may not be traveling the route you expected when you first put your little plastic car on the board, but that doesn’t mean there is no road forward.
Mall Madness: “I Want It” Is Different From “I Can Afford It”
Mall Madness encouraged players to race through a shopping mall buying everything on their lists. Divorce sometimes produces its own version.
“I want to keep the house.”
“I want to keep my retirement.”
“I want to maintain exactly the same lifestyle.”
Those may be understandable goals, but divorce requires more than deciding what you want. It also requires determining what the numbers actually allow. In other words, before heading to the checkout counter, make sure the numbers can support the purchase.
Girl Talk: Your Friends Are Not Your Divorce Lawyer
If you remember Girl Talk, you probably remember sleepovers, gossip, and embarrassing questions.
There is certainly a place for trusted friends during a divorce. You need people who will listen when you are frustrated, take you to dinner after a difficult day, and remind you that there is a world after your divorce.
But friends also tend to provide advice. The problem is that no two divorces are identical. New Jersey courts consider the particular facts and circumstances of each family, and what happened in someone else's divorce may have little relevance to yours.
Use your friends for support. Use your attorney for legal advice.
Clue: Who Did What, Where, and With Whom?
Your divorce attorney wants to know what happened during the marriage. Sometimes that history is legally important. Sometimes it isn’t.
Many marital grievances may have little impact on the ultimate financial outcome of a case. That can be difficult to accept when someone believes that proving the other spouse behaved badly should determine how assets are divided or whether support is paid.
Unlike Clue, most divorces do not end with someone triumphantly announcing that Colonel Mustard did it in the library with the candlestick. Sometimes everyone already knows what happened. The challenge is figuring out what comes next.
THE TAKEAWAY
You can take away useful lessons from old board games. Just remember that when it comes to your actual divorce, you should choose your moves carefully. Unlike the games in your childhood pantry, you can’t simply fold up the board and put everything back in the box.
Contact one of our experienced family law attorneys at Cohn Lifland to discuss your strategy today.